THE 
-GARDEN YARD 86 
profitable under particular crops. You won’t 
need it, if you keep the soil supplied with humus. 
Don’t waste kitchen slops or any other waste 
water. It all has fertilizing qualities that will 
help your garden. Even in the winter it is a 
good plan to pour your slops on the ground, 
choosing a different spot each day so that no 
one place may get too wet and leave surface 
pools. Mankind in the lump is stupid, so stupid 
that we drain our fertilizing matter into our 
harbors and then dig it out again at the cost of 
four dollars the yard. 
But you need not be so stupid as that. Even 
some of our cities are now learning the value 
of sewage, notably San Antonio, Texas. This 
city, with its 85,000 inhabitants, has solved the 
problem of what to do with its sewage, although 
the city fathers leased the rights to a private 
corporation, instead of providing for the city’s 
own disposal of it. This company carries the 
sewage six miles out of town, and has built 
five miles of canal, through which the surplus 
sewage not used in irrigating, flows upon a 
filter-bed where all solids are removed, and the 
water runs into a big basin which covers about 
1000 acres. This basin being very shallow, the 
sun’s rays reach the bottom of it, and purify 
the water, so that, though it enters one end of 
